Dumb question… how is cooking passed down from generation to generation?

The passing of knowledge from parent to child is true in early life, but I think that as we grow and develop, external influences become more important.

My mother would have only been exposed to old fashioned Irish cooking as she was growing up. She learned to cook in school (they taught girls "Domestic Science in Ireland in the 60's) and by watching my grandmother. She learned how to feed five children on a very tight budget, and how to extract flavour from the cheapest ingredients. She only started to discover new cooking methods from other cultures in her adulthood, when she became exposed to cooking from outside Ireland. These days this effect of external influence is even stronger. The world is becoming a smaller place all the time. We travel, we are exposed to TV, books, the internet, new foods, new cultures.

I think that at this stage in my life (29) I am learning more than ever before, and 95% of my learning is coming from sources outside my family, and outside my home country. I am no longer learning from my mother on a regular basis, in fact quite the opposite is going on. I find that when I am talking food with her it is me who is teaching about techniques or ingredients.

I now live in Australia, where I am exposed to a whole new world of food and cooking, from Greek to South East Asian and everything in between. I now have a Malaysian sister in law who teaches me the lessons she learned from her mother growing up. My draftsman at work is Ukrainian, my engineer is Filipino, and they both tell me about the food their families cooked growing up. So knowledge is being passed not just linearly from parent to child, but also knowledge is being passed along branches to others to start a new line of knowledge which can be added to. As time goes by our knowledge branches out in all different directions from the lessons we learned at home as children (Imagine a tree, where the trunk is the lessons we learn at home, and the branches are lessons we learn from others).

In this increasingly multicultural and cosmopolitan world food is something that can really bring people together. People passing on the lessons of their elders to fellow food lovers of different backgrounds is a beautiful thing. I may be a little Idealistic, but I genuinely believe that food can help us as people to understand each other.

I'll tell you what we do pick up from our elders which we never lose, and which we will pass on to our children, is a curiosity and love of learning about food and cooking. That is the most important thing I have from my youth. I suppose I was very lucky growing up in that I had a parent who nurtured and encouraged my curiosity. If I am lucky enough to have kids some day, it will be this enthusiasm that I will try to pass on to them.

I learned from watching my parents and experimenting. My mother learned from her mother. I think it just goes back like that parent to child.

My mom wrote me a cookbook with her favorite recipes and notes about them.

She learned to cook from her mother.

My mother refused to teach me how to cook. I repeatedly asked but was told that boys don't need to know how to cook. So I really don't have the answer you were looking for going back through the generations.

I started learning how to cook at McDonalds. From there I started watching cooking shows on T.V. I actually kept a binder of notes for various recipes from the shows I was watching. From there I went off to college where, once I escaped the dorms, I finally got to really start experimenting with food and recipes. The first cookbook I bought was by Wolfgang Puck. This was during the era of NBCs reign on Thursday night. We would pool our money and buy ingredients and I regularly fed 5-8 hungry guys. The more I did the better I got at picking ingredients.

Towards the end of my college years all of my friends had graduated and moved away, I had left McDonalds to work for the college IT department and gotten married. My wife's entire repertoire of meals consisted of grilled cheese and scrambled eggs. We moved into a place near a whole foods type store. Over the next year we roasted garlic, baked muffins, and cooked various other things without fear. Both learning and having our own specialties.

Fast forward to today. We have two sons we have been teaching. The oldest will be making us sushi this Saturday night. The youngest is more of a sandwich master with his favorite being a BLT. We hope to pass on some of our favorite recipes to them but we're also perfectly happy helping them find their own favorites.

My grandmother and mom always had a lil box full of 3x5 index cards with recipes going back 50, 60 years, some from great gramma even. Family recipes being passed down generation to generation, now i have them! And hopefully my kids will take an interest.

Personally I asked my mom to teach me. It worked somewhat like an informal apprenticeship. I think she learned similarly. Both of us, after learning the basics, obviously learned from media and friends, and created original recipes as well.

When I started kindergarten my single mom went to college and then started working full time. My sister taught me how to tell when chicken or meat is cooked and how to use the oven and stove. My brother taught me how to make pancakes. When all of us kids moved out, we each got a present: a Betty Crocker cookbook. Besides that I didn't have anyone show me the reigns. I've burnt a lot of foods, cooked lots of rubbery meat, and made some horrible baked doorstops. Trial by error.

My mom herself though is a pretty good cook. She learned by being in charge of certain foods during Sunday/holiday dinners. But her main experience comes from her first husband. He demanded she learn how to cook like his momma could. She had to learn through the trial by error.

For my niece, I have her help me read out recipes. She has become familiar with words like blanching and understands how to use the fractions for baking. (I used to cut down recipes in half to make her rethink the correct amounts.) Now, at 13, she is in charge of one dish during Thanksgiving.

Passing down knowledge is usually done by getting a young child interested, involved, and making them in charge of something. This gives them pride and confidence in the kitchen "I made that all by myself, isn't it good?" However, sometimes you have to go out of your comfort zone and experiment. You won't always get good results. You may get something resembling tar, but you're learn a whole lot!

When I was little my mom gave me kid-friendly tasks like stirring, washing, measuring. When I was in 4th grade or so, she showed me some easy things I could cook using only the microwave and/or toaster oven (I guess that seemed like less of a fire hazard). When I was a teenager she showed me some simple recipes I could make using the stove/oven on my own.

Then I just went from there. At this point (I'm in my 30s now) she considers me the better cook and usually leaves the cooking to me while she spends time with the grandkids.

Every woman in my family is naturally gifted at cooking, myself included. The women in the family learn staples by watching rather than being taught. Except baking, I remember being taught to bake basic cakes and stuff in my childhood but I don't find baking nearly as much fun as cooking family staples and cooking as a whole.

I have to say, I miss my grandma's "singing lillies", no idea what they were... Some sort of shortcake with raisins. I wished I'd shown more interest in baking while she was alive.

one person makes it up, then tells another person.

I learned by watching my dad cooking and the internet taught me many things as well. The rest was trial and error.

My dad learned from his mom and then my mom. And also a lot of trial and error and some recipes that he finds in newspapers and magazines.

How I learned all my mother's recipes.

• Me: "Hey Mom, how do you make your X?"
• Mom: "Well I take some of this and that and mix it together then put it on the other thing and put it in the oven."
• Me: "How much of that?"
• Mom: "Oh I don't know, just some."
• Me: "How hot is the oven?"
• Mom: "About 350 or so, maybe 400."
• Me: "For how long?"
• Mom: "I don't know, until it looks done."

Funny thing, they all come out "right."

My mother learned to cook from her mother. My mother was born in 1919. I learned a lot about cooking from watching her and helping in the kitchen. She didn't make anything fancy, just home cooking. But she was a hell of a baker! I wish I had paid more attention to that because she never measured anything.

Guy here. I pretty much learned by helping out. Cutting, measuring, watching the pot for a few minutes. When my moms health got bad she shared her secret recipies with my dad.... i thought it was funny that i already knew most of them. I had been her sous chef dor years. To this day i credit her with my knife skills.